List of resources for Instructional Designers
- Image Creation
- Image Manipulation
- Publishing Software
- Video Editing
- Animation
- 3D Creation Software
- Stock Resources
- Video CDNs
- Accessibility
- Misc
InkScape- A Free and open source vector graphics editor for GNU/Linux, Windows and MacOS X. It offers a rich set of features and is widely used for both artistic and technical illustrations such as cartoons, clip art, logos, typography, diagramming and flowcharting. It uses vector graphics to allow for sharp printouts and renderings at unlimited resolution and is not bound to a fixed number of pixels like raster graphics. Inkscape uses the standardized SVG file format as its main format, which is supported by many other applications including web browsers.
Figma- A vector graphics editor and prototyping tool which is primarily web-based, with additional offline features enabled by desktop applications for macOS and Windows.
PenPot- The first Open Source design and prototyping platform meant for cross-domain teams. Non dependent on operating systems, Penpot is web based and works with open web standards (SVG). For all and empowered by the community.
Lunacy- Free graphic design software for Windows, macOS, Linux. Open, edit sketch files with ease. Built-in vector, photos, UI kits, and more.
Krita- A free and open-source raster graphics editor designed primarily for digital painting and 2D animation. The software runs on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and Chrome OS, and features an OpenGL-accelerated canvas, colour management support, an advanced brush engine, non-destructive layers and masks, group-based layer management, vector artwork support, and switchable customisation profiles.
Karbon- A vector drawing application with an user interface that is easy to use, highly customizable and extensible. That makes Karbon a great application for users starting to explore the world of vector graphics as well as for artists wanting to create breathtaking vector art.
Pixlr- Edit photos and create stunning designs right in your browser, on your phone or desktop for free. Start from an empty canvas, a photo, a video or select one of our professionally crafted templates.
Affinity- Professional photo editing, page layout, graphic design and illustration – available for Mac, Windows and iPad, subscription free.
Photopea- an advanced image editor, which can work with both raster and vector graphics. You can use it for simple tasks, such as resizing images, as well as complex tasks, such as designing webpages, creating illustrations, processing photographs and more.
Raw Therapee- RawTherapee is a powerful, cross-platform raw photo processing system, released as Free Software (GPLv3). It is designed for developing raw files from a broad range of digital cameras and targeted at users ranging from enthusiast newcomers who wish to broaden their understanding of how digital imaging works to professional photographers.
Kraken.io- Quick image optimization for web tool. Helpful to ensure that your images do not slow down load times in learning object tools such as Articulate Rise and H5P. Supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, Animated GIF and SVG formats.
ImageOptim- ImageOptim is excellent for publishing images on the web (easily shrinks images “Saved for Web” in Photoshop). It's useful for making Mac and iPhone/iPad applications smaller (if you configure Xcode to allow better optimization). ImageOptim removes EXIF metadata, such as GPS position and camera's serial number, so that you can publish images without exposing private information (but there's an option to keep the metadata if you need it). Locally installed so no issues with transferring proprietary images to a web-based tool.
Canva- In a visual world, Canva Pro makes it easy for teams to achieve their collective goals and create professional designs together, with premium features like Brand Kit, Background Remover, and more.
Scribus- Underneath a user-friendly interface, Scribus supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colors, spot colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation. Scribus has many unexpected touches, such as powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of color blindness or the rendering of markup languages like LaTeX or Lilypond inside Scribus. The Scribus file format is XML-based and open. Unlike proprietary binary file formats, even damaged documents can be recovered with a simple text editor – sometimes a challenging problem with other page layout programs. Scribus has been translated into more than 25 languages, and more are coming in the future.
OpenShot- A cross-platform, easy to use, quick to learn, and surprisingly powerful video editor.
Kdenlive- A powerful free and open source cross-platform video editing program made by the KDE community. Feature rich and production ready.
DaVinci Resolve- The world’s only solution that combines editing, color correction, visual effects, motion graphics and audio post production all in one software tool! Its elegant, modern interface is fast to learn and easy for new users, yet powerful for professionals.
Natron- Natron is a powerful Digital Compositor that can handle all of your 2D/2.5D needs. Its robust OIIO file formats and OpenFX architecture is what make Natron the most flexible open source compositor for the visual effects community. Its interface and functionally are the same across all platforms such as macOS, Linux and Windows. Natron has a powerful keying, roto/rotopaint, 2D tracking tools that are staple for all current film production project that requires visual effects.
Veed- Online video editing made simple. Cut, trim, crop, add subtitles, progress bars, transcribe and more!
Opentoonz- Software for the production of 2D animation. Based on the software "Toonz", developed by Digital Video S.p.A. in Italy, OpenToonz has been customized by Studio Ghibli, and used for the creation of its works for many years. Dwango has launched the OpenToonz project in cooperation with Digital Video and Studio Ghibli.
Vyond- Vyond’s online video animation software allows your business to easily create professional animated videos for all industries in job roles like marketing, sales, training, and eLearning. Vyond is changing the way the world communicates, one video at a time.
Blender- Free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
Tune Pocket- TunePocket is a royalty free stock music library. Get unlimited download access to thousands of music tracks, loops, and sound effects with an affordable subscription plan. Use our music in personal and commercial videos, films, games, and other projects. New music added daily.
Ben Sound-Royalty Free Music is copyright safe, cleared and ready to use for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, Vimeo, and most Platforms: Your videos are cleared forever, even if you close your membership or account. All Pay-per-Track and All Access subscription plans get you a perpetual license valid forever. You want to cancel your membership? Not a problem! All your projects using our royalty free music are cleared forever!
Jamendo- Jamendo’s mission is to offer the perfect platform for all independent artists wishing to share their creations as easily as possible, reaching new audiences internationally. Our philosophy is that any artist in the world is entitled to share his music and should have a chance to be heard by a greater number of people around the world. We also believe that any artist should benefit from sharing their music. That’s why we help artists make money by licensing their songs for commercial use. Thanks to Jamendo Licensing, we answer the needs of anyone searching for any style of music to be used immediately in a film, a TV program, a commercial, an online video or as background music for commercial space; all at a fair price. With such use of their songs, artists find new sources of revenue while getting wider exposure.
Noun Project- A site for sourcing modern icon sets and images to explain concepts. Requires a free account to download. Icons can be used for free if attribution watermark is included. For use without limitation a small fee can be paid for each icon design.
Pixabay- A free stock photography and royalty-free stock media website. It is used for sharing photos, illustrations, vector graphics, film footage, and music, exclusively under the custom Pixabay license, which generally allows the free use of the material with some restrictions.
Unsplash- A free royalty-free photography website. Used by professional and amateur artists to share high-quality photos, textures and 3D rendering. Content available under unspash license which encourages but does not require attribution.
StorySet- Do you want the illustrations to come to life on your website? You can animate them directly with our online editor! Cool Illustrations to power up your project. Hundreds of illustrated concepts to make your landing page,app, or presentation more attractive.
Lordicon- Lordicon is a powerful library of carefully crafted animated icons, ready to use in digital products, presentations, or videos! Animated icons bring static images to life, effectively expressing everything from meaning to function. They delight by doing more with less.
ArtGrid- Discover story-driven footage from today’s top cinematographers from around the world. Filmmaking is our passion. So, we understand what today’s creative filmmakers need to produce amazing films. Not a marketplace full of random shots, but a catalog focused on footage that inspires creativity and brings impact to your film. No filler - Every moment should tell your story.
Wistia- Wistia is designed exclusively to support the needs of B2B companies using video for marketing, support, and sales. Wistia is preferable if you’re looking to drive traffic to your website, improve conversions, or increase engagement across the websites you control. Custom video players with custom video or static thumbnails tend to get more clicks, video SEO helps you drive more traffic, and email collectors help you generate leads, which you can send into your CRM of choice. Getting someone’s email establishes a direct line of communication for you to bring them into other campaigns and channels.
Contrast Grid- Test many foreground and background color combos for compliance with WCAG 2.0 minimum contrast.
Who Can Use?- Make sure that your colour choices will perform well for all users. Including those with colour perspection differences, certain visual impairments and also in different lighting conditions.
Understand Subtitles- Guide from the BBC explains the different types of subtitles, including closed captions and open captions. It provides visual examples and explains the different file types.
Rev- Rev’s speech-to-text solutions offer unmatched accuracy. Whether you’re a small business, a Fortune 500 company, or something in between, Rev helps maximize the value of your content, make your brand more accessible, and grow your audience.
SRT to VTT converter- Convert SRT (the subtitle file type that Camtasia and some other tools put out) to VTT, the format required by Microsoft Stream, SharePoint and others. Create your own HTML file including the source code to run this locally on your computer.
Well Said Labs- With WellSaid, you and your team can create voiceover for all your digital content. All it takes is one click. Pick from a range of voice avatars to find the perfect fit for your production. Create voiceover straight from your script, with one or many voices. Share projects and files with team members for feedback and co-production. AI for good. Technology should be empowering, engaging, and fair to all people. Through consent and transparency in data usage, we build secure systems that protect user privacy. We strive to hold ourselves accountable for the algorithms we deploy, and we uphold the principles of the Hippocratic Oath.
Natural Readers- Use text to speech to easily convert and download audio licensed for use on YouTube, eLearning platforms, or any other public use or redistribution purpose.
Descript- Descript is a collaborative audio/video editor that works like a doc. It includes transcription, a screen recorder, publishing, and some mind-bendingly useful AI tools. Descript's Overdub lets you create a text-to-speech model of your voice or select one from our ultra-realistic stock voices.
Transcribe tool in Microsoft Word Online- The transcribe tool in Microsoft Word online allows you to upload an audio of video file and generate a written transcript. This can include multiple labelled speakers and you can choose to include these labels and the timecodes in the text or have the text alone. This is very helpful for transcripts of audio and video for accessibility reasons. Also helpful for transcribing interview recordings for further in-depth text analysis.
Coqui TTS- Coqui ("ko-kee") is dedicated to open speech technology and to serving as the hub where speech researchers, developers, and practitioners congregate. Over the intervening years we built open sourced STT and TTS engines which have been used by hundreds of thousands of people. Also, we kicked off projects open sourcing thousands of hours of speech training data. A vital, knowledgeable, and supportive community joined the cause and accelerated progress exponentially. GitHub
Pixel and Bracket- I'm Spencer, a designer and content creator from Indianapolis, Indiana. Pixel & Bracket is my creative outlet to help educate and inspire others.
TJ Free- I try to provide accurate information for people looking for free alternatives to proprietary and paid software. All of the programs recommend here are free to download and use, and the most are Free Open Source Software (FOSS).
Blender Fundamentals- This tutorial is part of the Blender Fundamentals series (version 2.8), produced by Dillon Gu. Find more free tutorials on: blender.org
Ducky 3D-Creating tools and tutorials for the 3D Blender world
Chris P.- I create tutorials for Blender, the free, open-source (and just freaking awesome) 3D software!
Asten Regis- Helping you tell your story through video. On this channel get the best tips and tools for film making gear and learn through tutorials to create the best videos to tell your story. From video editing to camera, lighting and audio gear. Great playlist for videos <3 min on Adobe Premier.
Javier Mercedes- On this channel you will find video editing tutorials for Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, video and audio production tips, and video/audio tech reviews. Check out my website for video editing preset packs and bundles to save you time creating videos! Leave the razor behind and use insert and overwrite for trim and cut!
Devlin Peck's Community- An asynchronous forum with lots of members and many different channels of discussion. Devlin is well known in the ID community and runs his own bootcamp. This community is also a place for bootcamp members to connect and get feedback on their projects.
Reddit Instructional Design- An asynchronous Reddit community that has been around since 2012 and has about 20.5K members. They also have a discord channel.
Awesome ID- This is my own discord community that anyone is welcome to join. It was created to compliment this GitHub project.
Storyboarder- Storyboarder makes it easy to visualize a story as fast you can draw stick figures. Quickly draw to test if a story idea works. Create and show animatics to others. Express your story idea without making a movie.
PHP-Dyamic-Qr-code- PHP Dynamic Qr code is a script that allows the generation and saving of dynamic and static QR codes. It has clean, responsive and user-friendly design. It is Based on AdminLte the "Best open source admin dashboard & control panel theme. Built on top of Bootstrap" and Core PHP Admin Panel, a simple Admin Pannel written in core PHP that contains an implementation of general features you might need in your website admin panel like: record management (CRUD), secure authentication, pagination, filters.
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H5P- Free interactive HTML5 flashcards. This content type allows authors to create a single flash card or a set of flashcards that have both questions and answers. Learners are required to fill in the text field and then check the correctness of their solution.
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Quizlet- Ability to create and share flashcards. Geared towards a K-12 audience but can be used by anyone for a variety of use cases.
-Adobe Color Wheel- Free web tool for creating color schemes using a colour wheel with built-in color theory. Now includes a contrast checker.
- Firefox Eyedropper- Sample the HEX code for any element you find on the web (in a photo, in a web design, etc.). Select the hamburger menu on the top-right of Firefox. Then select More tools to use the Eyedropper.
Map It: The Action Mapping Book- No more information dumps! Map It helps you turn training requests into projects that make a real difference. Using humor and lots of examples, Map It walks you through action mapping, a visual approach to needs analysis and training design. Organizations around the world use action mapping to improve performance with targeted, efficient training.
Design for How People Learn (Voices That Matter)- In Design For How People Learn, Second Edition, you'll discover how to use the key principles behind learning, memory, and attention to create materials that enable your audience to both gain and retain the knowledge and skills you're sharing. Updated to cover new insights and research into how we learn and remember, this new edition includes new techniques for using social media for learning as well as two brand new chapters on designing for habit and best practices for evaluating learning, such as how and when to use tests. Using accessible visual metaphors and concrete methods and examples, Design For How People Learn, Second Edition will teach you how to leverage the fundamental concepts of instructional design both to improve your own learning and to engage your audience.
Telling Ain't Training- Provides practical information for trainers and performance improvement professionals. This book tackles the three universal and persistent questions of the profession: How do learners learn? Why do learners learn? And how do you make sure that learning sticks?
The eLearning Designer's Handbook: A Practical Guide to the eLearning Development Process for New eLearning Designers- The eLearning development process doesn’t have to be as complicated as it might seem. If you’re new to eLearning, Tim will walk you through the complete eLearning design and development process, providing you practical tips and advice, based on his own experience working as an eLearning designer for over a decade.
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Evil by Design- If you know about the techniques you can see when someone tries them on you. If you are a designer you can use the design patterns either for good or evil. It’s up to you. The book? You should buy it. No, really. It’s an entertaining read, regardless of whether you ever plan on designing sites or products to use the techniques. It explains the psychological principles behind 57 evil design patterns, using examples from all over the Web. Full color on every page. Less than 50 cents per pattern!
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The Age of Surveillance Capitalism- The challenges to humanity posed by the digital future, the first detailed examination of the unprecedented form of power called “surveillance capitalism,” and the quest by powerful corporations to predict and control our behavior.
In this masterwork of original thinking and research, Shoshana Zuboff provides startling insights into the phenomenon that she has named surveillance capitalism. The stakes could not be higher: a global architecture of behavior modification threatens human nature in the twenty-first century just as industrial capitalism disfigured the natural world in the twentieth.
Zuboff vividly brings to life the consequences as surveillance capitalism advances from Silicon Valley into every economic sector. Vast wealth and power are accumulated in ominous new “behavioral futures markets,” where predictions about our behavior are bought and sold, and the production of goods and services is subordinated to a new “means of behavioral modification.”
The threat has shifted from a totalitarian Big Brother state to a ubiquitous digital architecture: a “Big Other” operating in the interests of surveillance capital. Here is the crucible of an unprecedented form of power marked by extreme concentrations of knowledge and free from democratic oversight. Zuboff’s comprehensive and moving analysis lays bare the threats to twenty-first century society: a controlled “hive” of total connection that seduces with promises of total certainty for maximum profit — at the expense of democracy, freedom, and our human future.
With little resistance from law or society, surveillance capitalism is on the verge of dominating the social order and shaping the digital future — if we let it.
Weapons of Math Destruction- We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.
But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.
React
Typescript
Django
Laravel
Facebook
Microsoft
Google
Alibaba
D3
Tencent